Conventionally, in the field of software engineering, little (if any) attention has been paid to an amount of power that is consumed by a processing unit that is caused by software executed by the processing unit. This is because software has typically been designed for computing devices that have a constant and in diminishable supply of power (a personal computer that is plugged in to an electric outlet). With the explosive growth of smart phones, tablet computing devices, portable gaming consoles, and other mobile computing devices, power conservation is becoming increasingly important.
Software developers have begun to utilize certain techniques in an effort to conserve battery power of mobile computing devices. For instance, a developer may choose to employ TCP versus UDP, may configure an application to close certain sockets immediately upon the sockets no longer being necessary for execution of the application, or may configure requests to a remote computing device to be batched to utilize a wireless chipset as infrequently as possible. Furthermore, operating systems on mobile computing devices have been developed to conserve power by causing a backlight of a display of a mobile computing device to draw a diminished amount of power after a threshold amount of time of inactivity has passed.
With the growth of the market in tablets and smart phones, problems related to energy consumption of processing units in such devices are increasing. Both end users and developers are becoming increasingly sensitive to an amount of energy consumed by individual modules of a mobile computing device, such as a wireless chipset. Further, end users are becoming aware of which applications executed on mobile computing devices cause the battery life of the mobile computing devices to decrease rapidly. Several steps can be undertaken to reduce an amount of energy consumed by a portable computing device, including but not limited to turning off a wireless antenna, dimming the backlight of a display screen, amongst other techniques. Energy conservation, however, remains problematic.